


Like a Man

by TheSigyn



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-05
Updated: 2015-06-05
Packaged: 2018-04-02 23:19:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4077580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSigyn/pseuds/TheSigyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spike dismissed the memory. His thoughts were just some old remnant of his human life, a deja-vu that had nothing to do with the reality of the situation. They were vampire and slayer, not a lady and her escort. Spike considers the evening he spent with the slayer, the night of the truce. Set after Becoming.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like a Man

  
    “But where is my Daddy?” Drusilla turned around and around in the basement parking garage where Spike had stashed the car to await the night. Dru had gotten quite distraught when she woke up, and he’d had to park the car quick and deal with her.

    “As the world seems to still be spinning, I assume the slayer got him,” Spike said. “Or they got each other.” He was perched on the hood of the car, trying to smoke a cigarette. He’d explained the situation to Dru six times already, and she was only now starting to seem to understand. Sort of.

    “But where is he?” Dru asked, her voice very slow. “The sky is bright orange, and there are birds in my blood. They’re catching me by the throat.” She stopped spinning. “Spiiike? Where’s my Spike?”

    There she was. He tossed out his cigarette and slid down. “I’m right here, darling,” Spike said, catching her from behind.

    “No!” Drusilla’s languid confusion cracked, and she scratched at him, knocking him backwards. “No! You’re the lamb in the wolf’s clothing, the sheep to the shepherdess. She’ll slice you into mutton. Where is _my_ Spike?”

    “I am yours!” Spike said harshly.  
 

   “My demon Angelus and my angel demon, both!” she cried out. “Slain, slain, slayer, oh, Daddy!”  
 

   “Now _stop that!_ ” Spike jumped up and grabbed her, pinning her arms to her sides. His tone intimate and desperate he stared into her mad eyes. “Don’t you see? I needed to get you away from him. You know what he’s done to you, what he was doing to you.” He caressed her brow, his other arm still holding her tightly. “Don’t you see, princess? I did it for _us_.”

    “There is no more us,” she said softly, with such despair it hurt his heart. “She has slain you. Slain my child and put a man in his place. Poison eating your dark heart, burning through you, I see embers rising, ashes falling, it will spread. It will never burn away until you are dust.” She raised her hand and touched his cheek. “My William, my dolly, my masterpiece. You were to be my effulgence. Now you’re all dark, eclipsed by the shadow of the world. Oohh!” She placed her hand between their faces and moaned as if he’d just been dusted. She crumpled in his arms, and he had to hold her or she’d have fallen to the pavement.

    “It’s all right, pet,” he whispered. He knelt down and pulled her into his lap. “It’s all right, I’m here. I’m here for _you_ , I did this for _you_ , so that we could be together again. We need the world, pet. We need the blood, we need your stupid birds.” He kissed her face, stroking her fine brown hair, trying to make her look at him. “Don’t you see? You need me. Angel would have broken you – again. You couldn’t take it again. I couldn’t stand by and watch it.”

    “Both, both, both,” Drusilla moaned. “She’s taken them both!”

    Spike realized that wherever she was, his arms weren’t reaching her there. This happened often – Dru was impossible to reach fully. No matter how close he got to her, she was always one reality away. It tore at his heart, but he loved her. He needed to love her, or he was nothing. He knew it.

    He pulled her to him and rocked her like a child, but he might as well have been rocking one of her dolls for all the good it did her. “I’m here, Drusilla. Sweet, love, darling, I’m all yours.” But Drusilla kept moaning about how the slayer had taken both her sweet demons, and Spike knew when Dru was going to keep him locked out. She sometimes got odd impulses in that state, so he hoisted her over his shoulder and opened the trunk of the car. He’d set it up nicely for just these occasions, when Dru was too far gone to be trusted with herself. He curled her in amongst the satin sheets and lace pillows, and tucked one of her dolls into her arm. She was past seeing him. By this time she was mumbling something about being pierced by the kisses of the swords of hell. He tried to kiss her forehead, but she screamed, so he stepped back and closed the trunk on her, trying not to feel the pain in his heart.

    There were none of the characteristic thumps which told him she was protesting it, but he could still hear her muttering nonsense to herself. He sighed. It was going to take her a while to forgive him. She might not ever understand. He wasn’t sure what she had been going on about – poison in his heart, his effulgence eclipsed until he would be ashes. He didn’t know whether she was battling another prophecy, or just couched in her madness. He couldn’t always tell, and she sounded very distraught. He’d be dealing with this for weeks, he knew. He suddenly felt immensely weary.

    He crawled into the back of his paint-spacked car to get some rest until sunset. It was a failure. Dru’s inconsolate muttering kept him awake. He opened a bottle of whiskey and tried to drown her out that way, but he could still hear her through the soft padding of the back seat. He lay awake, thinking.

    The slayer. It was a strange thing he’d done, arranging a truce with a slayer, but there was no call for Dru to go on about it like she was. He hadn’t betrayed Dru. He’d only kept their food source intact and rid themselves of her torturer, where was the crime in that?

    He’d been trying to figure out the best way of ridding themselves of Angelus ever since he’d returned, harder and stranger than ever, with even less acceptance of “Drusilla’s folly,” as Angel often called Spike. Spike had endured his taunts. He’d endured his arrogance. He’d even endured Angel taking Dru to his bed – sometimes right before his eyes no less. But it was getting more and more clear that Angel intended to ditch Spike somewhere along the way, if not dust him outright, and Dru either couldn’t see it, or flat wouldn’t. Or... didn’t care, so long as she had Angel back. He winced at the thought – probably not wholly untrue, but he didn’t want to admit it. Of course, Angel owned her. He’d created her, in a dozen different ways, and Spike had always just had to accept that. Well, no more.

    It was over now. Angel was gone. And the slayer.... He couldn’t imagine how she could have survived. His mind kept flashing back to that moment in the garden, Angel towering over her, the slayer crouched on the ground, off balance, out of breath, battling. _I don’t see how he didn’t kill her. She must be so much cooling meat by now._

    The idea did not fill him with the joy he felt it should.

    He took another sip of his whiskey, and the scent of the slayer caught in his nose. He’d hit her in the face earlier that day, and her scent was still on his knuckles. He caught himself sniffing at it. Sweet... potent. Like Southern Comfort. God, last night had been... strange.

    Proposing the truce had been all business. Distract the cop, state the case, propose the deal. He’d done things like that a thousand times, with vampires, demons, and yes, even humans. It was only after she’d agreed to hear him out that things started to feel... strange.

    It had started with the walk. They left the area as untrusted allies, each walking beside the other suspiciously. He supposed the suspicion never really faded, but the walk had been... strange. Perhaps it was only his age. As a man he’d often been called on to escort a woman home, back when his blood was weak and human and his gentleman’s ethics dictated that all women be treated like precious gems whose presence was a gift in itself. The walk had felt like that – awkward and formal, with glances dancing back and forth between them. Unable to look straight at her, unable to look away for long.

    It had felt like a scenario from the distant past. He’d felt like a man asked to walk his friend’s niece to her front door, while the friend ran off to some illicit liaison. The niece didn’t really want to be there with him, but would otherwise have been lost to impropriety, abandoned in a world of cruel and dangerous men. The man didn’t really know her, but she was lovely and temperate, and he enjoyed her company.... The sensation of a forced and propitious escort was unshakable, and... strange.

    No. It was just some old remnant of his human life, a deja-vu that had nothing to do with the reality of the situation. They were vampire and slayer, not a lady and her escort. Except....

    Arriving at her house, where he’d suddenly been presented to her mum. The complete bewilderment on Joyce Summers’ face which had left him no doubt, and prompted him to ask, “What, your mum doesn’t _know_?” It had been less curious than chastising. How could a slayer, destined to fight and die, not inform her mother of the dangers of the world? It would doom her mother to danger, or leave her wondering what had become of her daughter when she was finally taken out. Spike’s heart had gone out to the woman – he always had a soft spot for mothers, much to his chagrin. Another remnant of when he’d been a man.

    Trying to cover up the truth had been amusing. A young girl caught in a lie, piling up plausible falsehoods in an attempt to shield her mother from the unpleasant truth. “In a band. With Spike, here. Well, I sing.” (He was pretty sure he could fake that if called on for proof.) He’d felt like a teenaged boy trying to cover up mischief.

    And then the fight came. Angel’s minion had attacked, and he and Buffy had fought as one. Their styles meshed – he’d noticed that before – and were even more harmonious when fighting together than when fighting each other. The young vamp was dusted within five seconds, and there was no longer any chance of hiding the truth from Mrs. Summers. And suddenly, Spike found himself in the middle of a very human exchange, as Buffy found herself explaining the intricacies of an arcane and supernatural world to a woman previously wholly unaware.

    And in the middle of it, she’d invited him into her home. It wasn’t anything formal and vampiric, a great and ceremonious invitation to a dangerous being for an important conference. No. While trying to explain, “Listen, Mom, I know, it sounds weird, but there are vampires, and they’re very real. I was chosen as a slayer – get in quick – and it’s my job to rid the world of them.”

    “But I’m not sure I understand. Would you like to hang up your coat? Uh, Spike, was it?”

    “Do you remember when I was fifteen?  Look, just go sit down, would you?” Buffy had added to Spike. “Mom, listen, this is why I’ve never tried to get you to believe me before. I’m not crazy – I mean clearly, I’m not crazy. These things are real. Spike’s a vampire himself.”

    “Wait, you’re a vampire? I don’t understand.”

    “Spike’s a vampire,” Buffy told her mum. “And... and so was Angel.”

    “Angel, your boyfriend?”

    Spike had been invited into the house as an afterthought; one of the guys from work, showing up in the middle of an awkward family situation. Almost completely forgotten, he sat in the parlor – livingroom, he reminded himself, modern Americans don’t keep parlors – listening to Buffy trying to explain vampires and watchers and slayers and the end of the world to a woman who kept trying to interrupt with accusations of sneaking out at night, skipping homework, and instigating violence at school. Clearly Mrs. Summers was having a hard time integrating her role as Mother-of-a-Teenage-Girl with Mother-of-a-Supernatural-Defender-of-Humanity, and kept trying to turn Buffy back into a child again with every other sentence. Here he was, incredibly deadly vampire, killer of two slayers, William the Bloody the Big Bad, and he was shunted into the corner of the livingroom like an awkward houseguest unfortunately present for a family fight. For several minutes, he was almost completely forgotten. That was... strange.

    Then Buffy had to make a phone call, and Spike was left alone with Mrs. Summers. Buffy hadn’t even left an injunction not to kill her – which he thought an oversight, but still didn’t dare attempt, as he still needed Buffy’s help. But awkward small talk was nothing he had perfected in the last hundred years, though it was something he’d had to perform regularly when he’d been human. A vampire decides what he’s going to do, goes where he’s going to go, and takes what he wants, and he doesn’t have to engage in pleasant chit-chat on the way. Suddenly he had to try and figure out what to do with his hands and where to aim his eyes in the pleasant livingroom of a perfectly normal human being. “Have we met?” Mrs. Summers asked.

    “Ahm. You hit me with an axe one time,” Spike confessed. “Remember? Get the hell away from my daughter.”

    “Oh. So do you live here in town?”

    He’d almost laughed. Whatever else that woman was, she had stones. She was chatting up a known, deadly vampire like he was some bloke from down the street.

    When Buffy finished her conversation, he was almost disappointed. It was awkward as ass, exhausting, and his teeth were on edge, but somehow... somehow... the house was comforting. He’d been on edge ever since Angel had come back, Spike at first too injured to fight him, then realizing that Dru was too much under Angel’s thrall – again – to be on Spike’s side. A hundred years, and Dru had missed her “Daddy.” Spike was the one she took for granted. Of course, she’d always treated him a little like a doll. Angel had been treating him like a dog.

    He and Buffy had chatted, bargained, argued, before he headed back to make sure the watcher survived. Buffy held point for point, trying to buy every advantage from a strong position without fear. She was a slayer to be reckoned with – though he’d already known that. But it had been an interesting evening. A very, very strange evening. An evening unlike any he had spent in over a century.

    Drusilla’s moaning and muttering had faded to the heavy sounds of vampiric sleep, and Spike rolled over, trying to push the memory of that night out of his head. He was a vampire. He was a very skilled and dangerous vampire. A master of violence and a disciple of evil. He shouldn’t be dwelling on one strange and exotic evening in the home and company of human beings. He was a bloodthirsty, homicidal monster. He shouldn’t spend any more time thinking about that night.

    The night when he’d been treated... like a man.

  
  



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